Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I’ve taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I’ve chased South Africa’s first black billionaire through a Cape Town shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso’s grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon François Pinault. I’ve edited the magazine’s Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

Leadership Tip: Hire the Quiet Neurotic, Not the Impressive Extrovert

Most leaders are attracted to the guy or woman who seems confident and outgoing, unafraid in any situation or facing any challenge. They expect an extrovert to infuse any team with energy, to push ahead on projects and to motivate colleagues to do their best work. Meantime they have low expectations of anyone who appears neurotic, who seems withdrawn and too anxious to live up to their potential. Leaders expect neurotic employees to contribute little and to drag down colleagues’ morale.

Not true, says a new study by Corinne Bendersky, an associate professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. In a paper called “The Downfall of Extraverts and Rise of Neurotics: The Dynamic Process of Status Allocation in Task Groups,” Bendersky and co-author Neha Parikh Shah, an assistant professor at Rutgers Business School, explodes stereotypes about how extroverts and neurotics perform on teams. It turns out that extroverts contribute less than team members expect and the contributions they do make are not valued highly over time. Neurotics, by contrast, are motivated to work hard on behalf of their teams, who wind up appreciating their efforts, in part because they exceed everyone’s expectations. In the end, extroverts decline in the teams’ esteem while neurotics rise in status.

To reach these counter-intuitive conclusions, Bendersky and Shah ran two experiments. In the first one, they broke 229 MBA students into study groups of five people and surveyed their personalities. To determine whether students were extroverted, they asked them if they agreed with statements like, “I like to have a lot of people around me,” “I really enjoy talking to people,” and “I like to be where the action is.” To identify neurotics, they used lines like, “I often feel tense and guilty,” “Sometimes I feel completely worthless,” and “When I’m under a great deal of stress sometimes I feel like I’m going to pieces.”

After the personality assessments, they had the students predict how they thought their team members would influence their groups and how team members’ status would play out in the process. The more extroverted the student, the higher their peers rated their expected influence and status. The neurotics got much lower ratings.

Then Bendersky and Shah waited for the ten-week academic quarter to pass and went back to the students to ask them how their team members had done. It turns out the extroverts disappointed their peers and lost status in the group as a result. The neurotics, by contrast, exceeded expectations and contributed more generously to the group than anyone had expected, driving their status up over time.

In the second experiment, Bendersky and Shah set up an online study with 300 people who were told they needed to make an urgent request for help preparing a work presentation from a colleague named John, who they didn’t know well. The survey described John as either extroverted, introverted, neurotic or emotionally stable. The survey then reported that John answered the request, either saying he was too busy to help much or that, even though he was busy, he would help as much as needed.

After the response from John, the survey asked about the respondents’ perception of John. As with the first experiment, respondents expected a lot from the extroverts and evaluated them quite critically if they gave an ungenerous response. By contrast they expected little of the neurotics. The ungenerous neurotics didn’t change much in the eyes of the respondents while the generous ones leapt in status. “The neurotics are rated as being more generous and exceeding expectations for the exact same response,” explains Bendersky.

UCLA's Corinne Bendersky.

What does this mean for team leaders? Bendersky says they should rethink their assumptions about how extroverts and neurotics will perform. “The extroverts are probably going to contribute less to the team and the contributions they make will be undervalued by the team,” she says. “They will do less and what they do will be under-appreciated.” By contrast, neurotics are motivated by their anxiety and feelings of inadequacy to work hard on behalf of the group. Meantime the group appreciates neurotics’ contributions because they exceed people’s low expectations.

The lesson of the study: Bendersky says team leaders should be wary of extroverts. “The core of an extroverted personality is to be attention-seeking,” she observes. “It turns out they just keep talking, they don’t listen very well and they’re not very receptive to other people’s input. They don’t contribute as much as people think they will.” If she were putting together a team, says Bendersky,“I would staff it with more neurotics and fewer extroverts than my initial instinct would lead me to do.”

The paper will be published in the April issue of the Academy of Management Journal.

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Susan, thanks for the great write up! If anyone is interested we’ve made the AMJ paper you mention free to all for the next 30 days. It can be found at http://amj.aom.org/content/early/2012/07/20/amj.2011.0316.abstract

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I feel that the results are mainly due to that initial expectation people automatically have of extraverts and the low standards they have of the introverts. An extravert and an introvert can be producing the same quality of work but the introvert is rated hire after because of that initial low expectation.

There seems insufficient evidence to suggest that one’s mode of performance is based on other’s expectations of them. Conversely, there are mountains of evidence that the extrovert (as characterized in the article, a Sanguine) is rarely a good decision maker. Likewise, the introvert (as characterized, a Melancholy) is often a good one. The former abhors details while the latter thrives on them. Melancholys (and Cholerics, not discussed by traits in the article) tend to be effective leaders, particularly the Cholerics.

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I agree also “distinction between extroverts and neurotics but I’m sure it applies with introverts as well.” in my case I consider myself a introvert person and I´m sure that I have good skills even better than others

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I was about to write a schpeel on how not all introverts are self-conscious and insecure. But the author uses the word neurotic making me completely agree with this article. Neurotic people are very insecure and they tend to be perfectionists. This will make some of them try very hard at what they do. However, I don’t think there is a comparison between extroverts and neurotics because they both possess different skills that aren’t very comparable. I’d hire extroverts and neurotics for different purposes. Extros for team motivation and to be leaders and neurotics for detail work

I agree, it depends what type of position your are looking to fill…typically I would hire extroverts for innovation and introverts for getting the job done but these are only one of many characteristics of ones personality and capability therefore you cannot just base it on this one factor.

Thanks for your comment. While I thought the report was interesting enough to write about, personally I think that personalities are often complicated and conflicting, and it’s tough to fit people into neat categories. I know extroverts who are also highly neurotic, for instance.

Is there a scholarlyrationale in business/leadership research for using “neurotic” as the opposite of “extrovert”, rather than “introvert”? I couldn’t glean from the abstract why this word pair was used. “Neurotic” has more of a medical or diagnostic meaning, which implies an abnormal condition. “Extrovert” is a personality quality without the same medical or diagnostic stigma. I found the use of “neurotic” very troubling. Individuals who prefer time alone rather than group activities to ‘recharge’, whose first response to issues is contemplation, and who do better when they have time to do solitary work are not “neurotic”.

This article also suggests that leaders pay attention to the work environment and culture for ways that these privilege extroverts, impulsive speaking/action, or group activities over introverts, contemplation, and individual work opportunities. Ideally, an organization should accommodate a range of personalities and work styles.

Perhaps the interview process and schedules also should adapt to allow introverts’ strengths to shine more, rather than continuing a process that appears to favor extroverts.

I should have known this article was going to be garbage. The study was about worth relative to expectations, whereas the article headline made it out as if somehow neurotics actually performed better.

Moreover, the study itself (at least as presented in this article) seemed to super-overgeneralize into a single dimension: extroversion-neuroticism. This seems pretty silly to me.

I thought this was going to be a great article about how extroverts come across great in interviews, but then when it comes to actual work, you find that they are all talk and bluster with little substance, and so you’ll do better to hire people who are more competant, though quietly so.

I love introverts. I married one. I’ve got no problem with introverts, or the people who think we should re-structure our organizations and our worldviews to get better balance between introverts and extroverts.

But you know what? Your comment right there – so much more than this article – is frankly offensive. I’ve been an extrovert my whole life, as a matter of fact, and because my parents instilled this thing in me called a “work ethic” as a young man, I’ve managed to turn in really *good* performance in pretty much every job I’ve had.

The headline on this article really, really, really does Forbes, you, and your readers a disservice.